Select Institute Projects and Events

Institute research projects provide students with the opportunity to work with professors studying and analyzing relevant controversies, channeling their work to the real world.

Innovate/Activate
This event is an unconference on intellectual property activism. The student-run event will bring together students, scholars, professionals, and organizations in order to collectively explore the current global intellectual property landscape and its effects upon activist efforts, as well as the ways in which activists can take advantage of (or, in some cases, circumvent) intellectual property in order to bring about social, political, environmental, and legal change.

Peer-to-Patent
Peer-to-Patent is an initiative of the Institute in cooperation with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) where NYLS students work together to manage the project. The concept behind Peer-to-Patent is to harness a collaborative network of citizen experts to help identify and evaluate relevant prior art for consideration by patent examiners. Peer-to-Patent accomplishes this by soliciting public participation in the prior art search process via the Web.

The Public Interest Book Search Initiative
The groundbreaking proposed settlement in the Google Book Search case is so complex that controversy outpaced conversation and questions outnumbered answers. The Public Interest Book Search Initiative aims to help close these gaps. Professors, students, and volunteers who believe that the Google Book Search lawsuit and settlement deserve a full, careful, and thoughtful public discussion work to maintain and promote the project's website, The Public Index, and the "D is for Digitize" conference.

The Handbag Project
The legal questions that this project answers are most notably in the area of consumer confusion and the concept of post-sale confusion, but it also considers the intriguing way that luxury handbags have become such a staple of modern life, and the role that both counterfeit bags and trademarks play in this. Students collect data from major fashion houses and luxury goods producers, research case precedent of intellectual property infringement, and produce research papers.

Writing Competitions Workshop
The purpose of the workshop series is to provide guidance about writing for IP writing competitions, so that students know what they need to do to enter these competitions, when to get their work completed, and how to succeed at them. Participating students discuss their paper topics with each other, meanwhile Institute professors sit in on the workshop meetings to help steer the discussions toward the competition themes.